11 - Holding Experience Loosely: High Hopes

Summary

Hard Labour and Meantime were criticized by some on the far left for not showing the barricades being manned, the revolution being made, for not fighting back. But I'm not really concerned with coming up with simplistic answers. I'm concerned with formulating questions and with stimulating the audience's sense of how things should be.

–Mike Leigh

Leigh's sensibility is fundamentally comic, so it shouldn't be surprising that playing, joking, and clowning around are among the most important expressive events in his work, or that many of his most interesting characters, including Cyril and Shirley, the main figures in High Hopes, relate playfully to their own experience. It is central to Leigh's conception of them that virtually everything they say and do has a faintly comictinge to it. Leigh establishes this at the very start, in a series of scenes in which even the most unpropitious subjects are unexpectedly transformed into brief comic bits or one-liners – from terrorism (Cyril's sardonic “machine-gun the royal family” political views) to cacti (Shirley's hilarious routine about the names of her plants). The fact that the respective audiences for these particular witticisms are the humorless Mrs. Bender and the hopelessly obtuse Wayne makes the additional point that the play exists for its own sake. Neither Wayne nor Mrs. Bender “gets the joke,” but that doesn't stop Cyril and Shirley from inflicting it on them.

Fortunately, their cleverness is not lost on each other.